He said "root cause" is an ageing population and a rise in dementia patients is partly to blame for the problems in accident and emergency departments.

However, he said the NHS also needs to find alternative ways of caring for people outside of hospitals and in the community.

Speaking to ITV's Daybreak, he blamed the last Government for cutting back on out-of-hours care by family doctors.

"What we do need to do is have a very fundamental look at the way that A&E departments work, and in particular look at the alternatives to A&E because the last government... removed responsibility for out of hours care from GPs and that has caused a dramatic fall in confidence in the public in what their alternatives to A&E are," he said. "That's what we have to sort out."

Mr Hunt spoke out after the Foundation Trust Network warned casualty units are close to collapse within a year.

The Foundation Trust Network (FTN) criticised the funding system in England which penalises A&E units that oversee a rise in patients.

Chris Hopson, chief executive of the FTN, said: "Unless we can change the funding structure, the A&E system is going to fall over. We simply cannot carry on.

"Unless we can make some really significant changes over the next six months I think it's pretty clear the system is in danger of falling over next winter."

Separately, the College of Emergency Medicine warned that one in five accident and emergency units relies entirely on junior doctors at evenings and weekends.

Its study of more than 130 casualty units said that NHS departments were struggling to provide safe care, with doctors working in “intolerable” environments that place patients at risk.

A “worsening medical workforce crisis” meant many units were desperately short-staffed and heavily reliant on agency medics and junior doctors, it said.

Research has previously found that patients are 10 per cent more likely to die if they are admitted to hospital as an emergency at weekends. The new study examined 131 A&E departments — more than half of those in the UK. It found that more than 80 per cent did not have a consultant on duty at all times.

In some cases, gaps at evenings and weekends were filled by “middle-grade” doctors — those who have finished basic training but are still learning specialist skills and have yet to qualify as a consultant. However, at one in five A&E units, junior doctors fresh from medical school were the most senior staff working at evenings and weekends.

The report comes amid increasing concern that NHS emergency services are failing to cope, with rising numbers of patients forced to endure long waits. Experts say that the units are struggling to cope because patients have lost confidence in out-of-hours GP services, resulting in a 60 per cent rise in A&E arrivals over the past decade.

Last week one of Britain’s most senior A&E doctors said casualty units have begun to feel like “war zones” while the head of the NHS and social care watchdog said services were “out of control”.

The college, which represents A&E doctors, said “radical and fundamental” changes were needed to relieve pressure on services. Its report said that “urgent care centres” and units run by GPs should be set up to deal with patients who turn up at casualty units because they do not know where else to turn, and that efforts need to be taken to recruit more emergency doctors.

The college says trainee doctors are turning away from specialising in A&E because the pressures are too relentless, while others are choosing to emigrate because of the demands.

Taj Hassan, the vice-president of the college, said urgent action was needed to tackle a crisis in services. He said: “It is clear that working environments for them [doctors] at times are intolerable, associated with risk for them and their patients.”

Dr Dan Poulter, the health minister, said: “There are now around 6,000 more doctors working in our NHS than there were in 2010 but more needs to be done to tackle the historical shortages of medical staff in some specialities, including A&E, which we inherited from the previous government.”

He said the NHS was working to increase the number of A&E consultants and that hospitals needed to make sure they had staff employed at the right times.

Jamie Reed, Labour's Shadow Health Minister, said the warnings were "yet more proof the NHS is not safe in David Cameron's hands."

He said: "These are well-considered warnings from senior A&E staff on the very frontline of the NHS. That is why it's worrying when they say England's A&Es are understaffed on every level.

"Ministers will struggle to ignore today's warning. They must accept responsibility and ensure England's A&E are properly staffed."

Norman Williams, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said the pressures on A&E had now become “relentless” and were hampering patients’ access to emergency theatres and intensive care facilities.